Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson - The Treasures of Agra (1983)

Between 1979 and 1986 a series of Sherlock Holmes TV-movies were made for Soviet television. They were hugely popular in Russia (they triggered a real Holmes craze there) and well received internationally. Vasily Livanov starred as as Sherlock Holmes with Vitaly Solomin as Dr Watson.

The 1983 two-part fourth film, The Treasures of Agra (Sokrovishcha Agry), adapted both the 1890 novel The Sign of Four and the 1891 short story A Scandal in Bohemia (which is included as a flashback subplot).

Holmes has a new client, a rather sweet young woman, Miss Morstan. Her father had disappeared in India a decade earlier. Every year she receives, from an unknown source, a small package containing a very valuable pearl. Now she has received a letter promising information about her father if she agrees to a meeting.

It transpires that her father and a Major Sholto found a treasure hoard. There were perhaps others involved, and it seems there was double-crossing. And someone wants to make amends to Miss Morstan. She wants Holmes and Watson to accompany her to the meeting.

The meeting takes place, but a murder takes place as well.

The clues are puzzling, including an odd footprint.

Holmes will of course have to make use of his mastery of disguise.

There’s a man with a wooden leg, there are twin brothers, Inspector Lestrade turns up and arrests everybody in sight (everybody except the guilty parties) and there’s a very cool steam launch chase on the river.

There are revelations about the very murky events that took place years earlier, events which left a legacy of bitterness and guilt.

And Dr Watson is starting to become emotionally entangled with the charming and beautiful Miss Morstan.

In the second part we get the story of Holmes involvement with the glamorous sexy enigmatic Irene Adler and her apparent attempts to blackmail a minor European princeling. Many men have fallen for Irene Adler and Holmes is disturbed to discover that he is not immune to her considerable charms. Both Holmes and Watson display hidden romantic sides to their natures.

While Jeremy Brett’s twitchy neurotic performance in the British TV series is undeniably fascinating it is rather eccentric and many viewers will prefer Vasily Livanov’s more straightforward interpretation of the role. Vitaly Solomin as Dr Watson is a fine Dr Watson, not in the least foolish.

These Soviet TV-movies were clearly made by people with a great deal of respect for the source material, and also for the viewer.

When you look at the sets and costumes and the fine location shooting it’s obvious that real money was spent on this production. It’s very polished. It captures the feel of Conan Doyle’s stories and of Conan Doyle’s version of late Victorian London.

There is fog of course, but used to serve a purpose.  

The supporting cast is excellent. I loved Borislav Brondukov’s lively performance as Inspector Lestrade. This is a Lestrade who is not a fool, just ridiculously over-keen. He makes his arrests before thinking things through, but when he does think them through he is capable of admitting his mistakes.

Larisa Solovyova is a very glamorous Irene Adler. One can understand why Holmes becomes obsessed by her. 

Viktor Proskurin is very good as the rather jumpy Thaddeus Sholto.

The Russian DVD set includes all five movies with English subtitles.

Thoroughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed the first two TV films, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and The Hound of the Baskervilles. 

And I’ve reviewed Conan Doyle’s novel The Sign of Four.

The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968)

The Year of the Sex Olympics is a 1968 television play made by the BBC as part of the Theatre 625 anthology series. It was written by Nigel Kneale, best remembered as the creator of the Quatermass serials which aired on the BBC in the 1950s and which were adapted by Hammer as three very successful feature films.

The subject of The Year of the Sex Olympics is television itself. It is set in the fairly distant future in which a totalitarian regime maintains order by effectively drugging the populace with mindless television entertainment. Most of the programming revolves around sex but its purpose is to eliminate any desire for actual sex. In fact, to eliminate any desire for anything other than consuming television. 

The populace are to be indoctrinated to watch rather than to do.

In 1968 hysteria about overpopulation was starting to peak so the idea that the government would want to discourage procreation seemed extremely plausible.

The watchword is Apathy Control. The aim is to encourage absolute passivity and an avoidance of any passions. People must never experience tension.

This was 1968, when people were becoming obsessed by the fear of overpopulation. The government does not want people to have sex, at all. Just to watch.

The population is divided into two castes, Low Drive and High Drive. The High Drives run things. The Low Drives watch television.

Nat Mender (Tony Vogel) is the producer of one of the most popular TV programs, SportSex. Its ratings are high and it keeps the audience cosy and comfy. 

Nat’s current girlfriend is the ditzy blonde presenter of SportSex, Misch (Vickery Turner).

Nine years earlier Nat and Deanie (Suzanne Neve) had a daughter. They have little to do with her (there is no marriage and no family in this future society).

Deanie’s current boyfriend Kin Hodder works as a designer in TV but he has been spending his spare time painting pictures. Misch is horrified and bewildered by the paintings. They’re pictures but they don’t move. Kin wants the public to see the pictures but that’s not going to be allowed - it must cause people to experience tension.

An accident on set provides the inspiration for a revolutionary new show. It will be Nat and Deanie and their daughter on an island, with no modern technology. They will have to survive without help. The Co-ordinator (Leonard Rossiter) knows it will be a risk because it will show people dealing with fear, anxiety, cold, hunger and isolation. All the things that are supposed to be avoided because they might make viewers feel something. His hope is that experiencing these things vicariously will keep them in their cosy comfy vegetative state.

This is very obviously predicting reality TV. And it’s dealing with the widespread fears at the time that TV was turning people into moronic zombies. Mind control and brainwashing were major pop cultural obsessions from the late 1950s until the 70s. The Year of the Sex Olympics is perhaps the bleakest most cynical view of the entertainment industry of all time. When I first saw it I thought it was overly pessimistic, that such extremes of manipulation of the public were just a little implausible. Today, watching it again, I have the depressing feeling that its view of human nature is pretty much spot on.

The main target is obviously the elite who manipulate the populace whom they regard with fear and contempt. This teleplay is successful in that respect but there is an ironic twist in that one does get the slightly uncomfortable feeling that Kneale may (perhaps even unconsciously) have shared some of that contempt for the TV audience. And this is a BBC production and the BBC at that time certainly regarded ordinary people with undisguised loathing (and of course they still do). The audience members shown have the intelligence of cabbages. Maybe we’re meant to think that this is the fault of the elite but it still speaks to a breathtakingly pessimistic view of ordinary people.

The acting is very exaggerated and very stagey but given that every member of the cast plays things this way I assume that this was entirely deliberate and that the intention was to emphasise the artificiality of this future society, and of course to remind us that we are in fact watching a television show. We are watching a television show about watching a television show.

The aesthetic of this teleplay is the 1960s Flower Children aesthetic on steroids, which might put some people off but once you accept it it works well enough.

The Year of the Sex Olympics is in some ways very much of its time (for example the overpopulation fears) but well ahead of its time in others (it doesn’t just predict Reality TV, it predicts it with uncanny accuracy). It’s an extraordinarily jaundiced view of the television industry coming from an insider (by 1968 Nigel Kneale had already spent 17 years forking for BBC-TV). And of course the points it makes apply equally well to all electronic media including the internet.

It’s not cheerful viewing but it is powerful and unrelenting and it is highly recommended.

It was released on Blu-Ray but it could be hard to find.

I’ve also reviewed Nigel Kneale's fascinating 1976 TV series Beasts. He really was doing some amazingly inventive TV work in the 60s and 70s.

The Saint: The Set-Up, The Abductors, The Death Penalty

I’ve just finished reading (and reviewing) The Saint and Mr Teal, a 1933 collection of three Saint novellas by Leslie Charteris. Interestingly all three novellas were adapted as episodes of the 1960s ITC Saint TV series towards the end of the series’ black-and-white era. Having reviewed the novellas I thought it would be fun to do parallel reviews of the TV episodes in question.

It should be pointed out that The Saint and Mr Teal belongs to the first phase of the Saint’s adventures and features the first version of the character. At this stage Simon Templar still has a lot of the overgrown hyper-active schoolboy about him, with a schoolboy sense of humour and an extraordinary recklessness. The character evolved over the years, in a believable and logical manner. The Saint grew up. He became older and wiser, with a slight sense of wistfulness and while he never lost his taste for adventure it was tempered with good judgment. The Saint, as he grew older, also became more of a genuinely sophisticated man of the world, and a restless world-traveller. The character in the TV series is based on this final version of Simon Templar.

This necessitated a few changes when these stories were adapted for TV.

The Death Penalty

The Death Penalty was the ninth episode in the third season of The Saint. It was scripted by Ian Stuart Black and went to air in December 1964.

The big problem facing anyone trying to adapt the Saint stories for television in the 60s was that the stories had to be sanitised. Most crucially Simon Templar as a character had to be sanitised. He had to be sanitised a lot. In Charteris’s stories the Saint is an unrepentant criminal. He has ethics. He only steals from bad people. But he is a thief and feels no shame about it. The Saint is also extremely ruthless. If he thinks that a man really needs killing then he’ll kill him without feeling the slightest remorse. The Saint is one of the good guys, he’s on the side of justice, he is a sworn enemy to those he refers to as the ungodly but he also feels very strongly that sometimes the most effective solution to dealing with the ungodly is simply to kill them.

For television all of these elements had to be not merely toned down, they had to be eliminated. Unfortunately these elements were what gave Charteris’ stories their unique flavour. Simon Templar had to become a Boy Scout, which meant that he ceased to be Simon Templar. That the TV series worked so well was due largely to the charm and charisma of Roger Moore. I love the TV series, but it lacks the bite of the books.

The Death Penalty was a story that presented a very big problem. In this novella the Saint displays a breathtaking disregard for the law and sets out to commit coldblooded murder.

The basic plot outline is retained. There’s a power struggle between two crime lords, Stride and Osman. Stride’s daughter Laura becomes an element in that struggle. There’s an Englishman working as secretary to Osman and he’s a mere shell of a man. Simon is determined to save Laura. There’s a climax on Osman’s yacht which ends in murder.

It’s an OK story but all the elements that added spice to Charteris’s story have been removed. In the novella Stride sells his stepdaughter to Osman to save his own skin. He is as rotten and corrupt and evil as Osman. In the TV episode Stride would never do such a wicked thing. He’s a criminal but a devoted father. In the novella Simon’s intention is to carry out coldblooded murder. In the TV episode Simon would never do anything so ruthless. He hopes to leave justice to the police. The secretary Clements is just a drunkard in the TV adaptation rather than a man who has been systematically stripped of his self-respect.

The TV episode is enjoyable enough but it lacks some of the edge of the original story. The novella is like a double Scotch with a dash of soda. TV episode is like a Scotch and soda with extra soda and no Scotch.

The Set-Up

The Set-Up, scripted by Paddy Manning O’Brine, went to air in January 1965 and was based on Charteris’s novella The Man from St Louis.

Again the basic plotline is fairly similar. An American gangster with ruthless American methods has been behind a string of daring robberies. He has a gang of would-be tough guy English crooks. Simon has decided that this sort of thing cannot be allowed to happen in England and as in the novella he’s prepared to assist Chief Inspector Teal.

Simon utilises the same ploy he utilises in the novella when Ted comes gunning for him. As in the novella Tex suspects that someone in his organisation has squealed.

The thieves are more up-market than in the novella and a female movie star is introduced into the story to add some glamour but these minor changes are very much in keeping with the feel of the TV series.

The climactic heist sequence is original to the TV script and it’s well executed. The ending is satisfactory although it lacks the twisted cleverness of the ending of the novella.

The Abductors

The Abductors, scripted by Brian Degas, went to air in July 1965 and was based on Charteris’s novella The Gold Standard.

Once again the bare bones of the original story are retained. A man is murdered in Paris and the murder is connected to a plan to kidnap his brother, a top metallurgist. Again there’s a sinister Mr Jones involved. And as in Charteris’s story Simon Templar was on the spot when the murder occurred.

Patricia Holm does not appear in the TV series at any stage (this is the later incarnation of the Saint as a loner) so as in several other episodes a female guest star is introduced to fulfil the same plot function - to lead Simon to the bad guys’ lair. In this case the guest star is the charming Annette Andre who would be a regular in a later ITC series, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). The Saint will have to rescue both the girl and the professor. It was presumably felt that one of the key plot points in the novella would have been too outlandish so it’s dropped and the reason for the villain’s interest in the professor is left rather vague.

And again the essential bite of the original story is missing.

All three episodes are quite good and reasonably enjoyable but none of them are up to the standards of Charteris’s stories. One can’t really blame the screenwriters. They had to make the stories more wholesome so as not to corrupt the fragile morals of British TV viewers and that’s what they did. Unfortunately in all three cases it meant that Charteris’s deliciously clever devious endings had to be sacrificed and replaced by utterly boring utterly conventional endings. It’s no wonder that this TV series reduced Leslie Charteris to despair.

I’ve reviewed the original novella collection The Saint and Mr Teal at Vintage Pop Fictions.

Dollhouse season 2 (2009-2010)

Much to everyone’s surprise Joss Whedon's Dollhouse was renewed for a second season. You do need to watch season 1 first. I reviewed it here.

There were some changes in season two, some of which were forced upon Whedon but some reflected a slight change in his approach to the series. Whedon also wanted a different visual style - more shadows and a more atmospheric film noir-tinged look.

Whedon and his writers are as convinced as ever that women are physically much stronger than men. Apart from being silly this leads to some poor writing. Instead of finding ways in which Echo can use her brains and her female strengths to get out of trouble the writers are content to just have her effortlessly beat up big burly guys. The nonsensical GirlPower! stuff gets totally out of hand in the second season.

The character of Echo undergoes some changes but they make sense. Whedon always liked very long characters arcs. The Buffy of Buffy season 5 is a totally different person to the Buffy of season 1 but the changes are plausible and organic. She has grown up. She has also begun to understand the full implications of being a Slayer. Cordelia has a complex character arc in both Buffy and Angel, and again it makes sense. She has also gone from being a high school girl to being an adult woman.

Echo’s evolution has more to do with her attempts to become a real person rather than just a Doll but it’s presented in a plausible way. Echo starts to remember things that she’s not supposed to be able to remember. She starts to develop intellectually. She’s no longer a child-like zombie. She starts to have emotions. Sierra and Victor start to evolve as well. They develop emotions, and they develop sexual feelings towards each other and Dolls are not supposed to be capable of such things.

The imprinting process starts to develop glitches. At the end of each Engagement the imprinted personality is supposed to be wiped completely but that’s no longer happening reliably. The Dolls start to retain traces of imprinted personalities. Echo ends up with lots of different personalities imprinted simultaneously and it’s no longer possible to wipe these imprints.

By 2009 of course every TV series had to have character development and had to have extended story arcs. As a result Dollhouse has several story arcs and it has a long story arc extending over both seasons. This is why we get the Dolls starting to behave like real people.

Unfortunately this undermines the original concept and that original concept was the series’ biggest strength. The idea was that a person could start out as a young woman named Caroline, have that personality erased, have a new personality (Echo) that is child-like and innocent, then be given other totally different personalities and then have them wiped and Echo would then have no memory at all of anything these other personalities had done. It raised provocative moral questions. If she (in the guise of one of these imprinted personalities) kills someone in the course of an Engagement does Echo bear any responsibility for this? She has no idea that it happened.

Most of the Engagements are in effect high-class prostitution jobs. In the course of a year she might have a hundred different sexual partners, but since Echo has no memory of any of this and has no sexual urges and no knowledge of sex you could argue that Echo is in fact a virgin. And is Adelle DeWitt actually running a high-price call-girl operation if the girls have no knowledge of having had sex with clients? Are you a prostitute if you don’t know that you’ve done it? And if one of the Actives commits a crime on an Engagement is she guilty of a crime?

These fascinating moral dimensions are less evident in season two, which is a pity.

There are however plenty of good things about season two. As Echo develops self-awareness other questions are raised. Her body was originally inhabited by a young woman named Caroline. Does Caroline still exist? And is Echo a real person? Was she a real person when she was little more than a cheerful zombie? And now that she has self-awareness and emotions, has she become a real person? The series gets interesting when Echo learns about Caroline. Caroline was a psycho bitch terrorist who got people killed. She was a nasty fanatic. Echo isn’t keen on one day giving up her own existence so that that bitch Caroline can have her body back.

The downside to season two is that Echo ends up with forty simultaneous implanted personalities, all of them experts in some field such as firearms and unarmed combat. As a result she becomes more of a generic comic-book kickass action heroine with super-powers. The series becomes more of a routine sci-fi action story rather than the provocative slightly cerebral serious science fiction series of the first season. There’s too much blowing stuff up and endless endless fight scenes.

From comments made by Whedon in an interview it seems that he was under immense pressure from the network to dumb the show down as much as possible. He was also forced to reduce the amount of sexual subject matter - he had hoped to explore the emotional and sexual ramifications of the technology much more fully.

And then there’s the major story arc and I found it disappointingly obvious, too much like countless science fiction movies of the past half century. To be fair the series was made with the threat of cancellation always hanging over it so some of the ideas may have developed more satisfactorily had Whedon not been forced to hurry things along.

Both seasons of Dollhouse are visually impressive with a much more coherent aesthetic than Whedon’s earlier Firefly.

One of Whedon’s great strengths was his ability to create interesting female characters and then develop them in complex ways and Adelle DeWitt in Dollhouse is one of the best examples of this.

The first season of Dollhouse is excellent and while this second season doesn’t work quite as well it’s still superior science fiction television and it’s highly recommended.

The Blu-Ray release includes both seasons and looks lovely.

Dollhouse (2009) season 1

The cyberpunk TV series Dollhouse, created by Joss Whedon, ran on the Fox Network in 2009 and 2010. Whedon’s career was up and down at the time. The Firefly TV series in 2002 was a disaster and was cancelled before the end of the first season although it later built a cult following. There was general surprise when Dollhouse was renewed for a second season. The ratings were mediocre but it did well with the demographics that advertisers cared about. To some extent that had been the case with Buffy as well.

The key concept behind Dollhouse, personality uploads and downloads, had been tinkered with by various science fiction writers, notably William Gibson. But as someone famous once said, if a story is good it probably isn’t new and if it’s new it probably isn’t good. That certainly applies to science fiction ideas. And Dollhouse is based on an idea that is definitely a good one.

Digital personality uploads are of course total scientific nonsense but Joss Whedon was the guy behind a long-running series about a high school girl who battles vampires so he clearly feels that the coolness of an idea is much more important than its plausibility. And he’s right. And in this case it’s an idea that has links to pop culture obsessions going back to the 1950s such as brainwashing.

It has affinities with movies like A Clockwork Orange and Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell which deal with questions such as artificial interference in the workings of the mind, the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy, the possibility of artificially created realities and what it means to be human. And what it means to have choices. And how choices are nowhere near as simple as they seem. In Dollhouse there are free choices and choices made under duress, or sometimes it’s just a choice between two bad options.

Echo (Eliza Dushku) has been created by the Dollhouse. The Dollhouse is run by Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Williams) although it seems certain that there is someone (or some organisation) much more powerful behind her. We are given no idea at all who or what is behind the Dollhouse and what its true purpose is. Is it a private corporation? Is it run by organised crime? Is it a government covert operation? This series deals in multiple levels of ambiguity and paranoia. Maybe nothing is as it seems to be.

For each case a Dollhouse agent has a different personality uploaded, tailored to the mission. In between missions Echo has her Echo personality restored. That’s not her original personality. She had been a girl named Caroline who had landed herself in very serious legal trouble. There is a suggestion that her original Caroline personality has been permanently erased. Now she is merely Echo, who has no memory of any of the personalities that have been uploaded to her brain. She seems to have no memories of anything before she arrived at the Dollhouse.

When imprinted with a suitable personality the agents are referred to as Actives. Between missions they are Dolls. The Dolls are very child-like, very passive, with no emotions and no sex drive and no desires of any kind. They are very obedient.

One inherent weakness in this series, or at least one aspect that probably hurt its ratings, is that Eliza Dushku is effectively playing an entirely different character in each episode and between missions she’s playing Echo who has no actual personality. This means the audience has no actual heroine with whom to identify, or for whom to develop an affection. This would have alienated some viewers although it does of course provide Eliza Dushku with an exciting acting challenge and if you stick with it it makes this an extremely interesting series.

While the Actives are given various missions (including security jobs and even secret agent-type jobs) It becomes very obvious very early that on most of those missions they are acting as at best, courtesans and at worst, high-class call girls. Even worse, Adelle DeWitt knowingly sends girls like Echo out on prostitution jobs knowing that the jobs are very high-risk. Worst of all, DeWitt doesn’t even bother finding out the true nature of the risks. As long as the client pays it doesn’t matter. Even the Mob has higher ethical standards. While that is presumably not its true function in practice The Dollhouse is a whorehouse.

But the twist is that the Dolls do not know they have been used as prostitutes. In their hazy dream-state they don’t know about the missions and wouldn’t understand if they were told. Are you a prostitute if you don’t know about it? Is Miss DeWitt a madam if she sends the girls out on prostitution assignments but the girls will have no memory of it And if a mission requires engaging in criminal activities (and some do) are they criminals? Is it our memories that make us who we are (a question addressed memorably in Blade Runner)? If the Dolls have no memories are they human?

And it seems that if someone is deemed to be a risk then the Dollhouse will take precautions. Possibly very drastic precautions.

The Girlpower! thing does get overdone. Petite women easily beating up huge tough guys. It’s a problem because the silliness of this does at times undermine the serious tone.

This is a long way from the teen angst of Buffy and it’s clearly aimed at an older audience. This series gets into X-Files levels of paranoia and then pushes the paranoia even further. This is serious conspiracy theory stuff. And the cyberpunk elements become more and more apparent.

There are fascinating relationships between the characters. Does Miss DeWitt have maternal feelings towards Echo? Does Echo see her handler Boyd Langton as a father figure? Does he see himself this way? And there are explicitly romantic and sexual relationships involving several key characters but what happens if you’re in a relationship with someone who doesn’t actually exist?

Episode Guide

In the first episode Echo is uploaded with the personality of a top-flight hostage negotiator. This episode launches the series on its way very successfully. It also introduces a couple of what are obviously going to be extended story arcs. There’s an FBI agent named Ballard investigating the Dollhouse although he’s been told to drop the matter because the Dollhouse doesn’t exist.

In episode 2, Time Target, the main story in intercut with multiple flashbacks. Non-linear narratives will be a major feature of this series.

We get some slight backstory on Echo’s handler, Langton. We find out that something went very badly wrong three months earlier and that those events may be continuing to exert an influence. We get hints that the Dollhouse people make mistakes. And we start to get an edge of paranoia creeping in. We also find out that when a guy wants to take a girl on a camping trip she should always decline. It will end in tears. Good episode.

In episode 3, Stage Fright, Echo’s job is to act as a bodyguard to a pop singer. The problem is that the singer is not just a diva but a psycho bitch and to avoid arousing her wrath Echo has to be a bodyguard without being aware that she’s a bodyguard. Someone is trying to kill the singer but there are very twisted complications.

In episode 4, Gray Hour, the mission is an art heist and it’s an armed robbery. Eliza Dushku really shines this one, getting a chance to explore the Echo persona.

In episode 5, True Believer, Echo goes undercover for the Feds. Her cover will be perfect since with an implanted personality she will believe her own cover story completely. It’s an investigation of a religious cult with obvious parallels to the 1993 Waco disaster.

In episode 6, Man on the Street, Echo is again a whore, this time entertaining a tech tycoon. I love the way this doesn’t develop in anything like the direction you’re going to be expecting.

In episode 7, Echoes, an experimental drug has infected a college campus. And some of the Dolls have been exposed as well.

In episode 8, Needs, things start to go awry in the Dollhouse. The Dolls are doing things they shouldn’t do. But Miss DeWitt has no doubt that she will get things under control again.

In episode 9, A Spy in the House of Love, the extended story arcs start to develop a lot more fully. As the title suggests the Dollhouse is under threat from within. And we see a very surprising side of Miss DeWitt.

In Episode 10, Haunted, the Dollhouse has a new client and she’s a bit unusual, given that she’s dead. And she thinks she was murdered.

Episodes 11 and 12, Briar Rose and Omega, make up a two-part story which explores interesting ramifications of the technology.

The season finale, Epitaph One, was made on the assumption that the series was not not going to be renewed for a second season and never went to air. Do not watch this episode until after watching season 2!

Final Thoughts

Dollhouse season one is moderately cerebral, provocative and willing to engage with slightly controversial subject matter. It’s a lot better than I expected and it’s highly recommended.

Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982-83)

Tales of the Gold Monkey is a U.S. action/adventure TV series which ran for a single season from 1982 to 1983. It was created by Donald P. Bellisario who was also responsible for such cool 80s TV classics as Magnum, P,I. and Airwolf. The cancellation of the series was not due to poor ratings. The show was a huge hit. It was network politics that killed it.

Although you could certainly be forgiven for assuming that Tales of the Gold Monkey was clearly hoping to capitalise on the recent success of Raiders of the Lost Ark (it does belong to the same “rugged individualistic adventurer in exotic locales” genre) in fact Bellisario pitched the series to the network a year before Spielberg’s movie was released. His inspiration was the classic 1939 Howard Hawks movie Only Angels Have Wings.

The setting is the fictional South Pacific island Bora Gora, a French colonial possession.

Jake Cutter (Stephen Collins) is an American airman with a small air cargo operation using a Grumman Goose amphibian (which happens to be my favourite aircraft of all time). He has an offsider named Corky (Jeff MacKay), a genius mechanic but with a chronically poor memory due to over-indulgence in alcoholic beverages. He also has a bad-tempered one-eyed dog named Jack.

Jake has a habit of trying to rescue damsels in distress but in the pilot episode his latest attempt, involving cute red-headed chanteuse Sarah Stickney White (Caitlin O’Heaney), gets him into all kinds of trouble. Sarah will become a regular character. There’s something very important about Sarah that Jake doesn’t know. She’s a spy.

Another regular character is Bon Chance Louie. He owns the Monkey Bar which is the island’s social hub and he’s the local representative of the French Government. He has the reputation of being lucky. He did after all survive the guillotine. In the pilot he is played by Ron Moody but Roddy McDowall takes over the role in the series.

Another regular is German missionary Willie Tenboom (John Calvin). We know from the start that he’s a German spy but he’s a sympathetic character and a nice guy. He is devoted to his parishioners who seem to be entirely attractive young women. One of them acts as his personal assistant. If she’s a good girl he gives her a blessing. She looks forward to that. There’s nothing a girl likes more than a good blessing. The Reverend believes that young women need to be blessed as often as possible.

And then there Princess Koji (Marta DuBois). She’s a Japanese princess involved in various ventures of dubious legality. She has a private samurai army. She’s a sexy bad girl, but not really evil.

Jake is also in trouble with Jack, having lost the dog’s false eye (which is a sapphire mounted in an opal) in a poker game.

There are monkey-men, venomous snakes and samurai warriors. And the island of Baku is an active volcano. A very active volcano.

There are spies everywhere on Bora Gora, from various nations. There are German, American and Japanese spies and possibly some freelancers. The German spies are in search of the legendary gold monkey of the island of Baku.

You have to remember that this is 1938. Japan was at peace with the U.S. and France. Germany was at peace with the U.S. and France. Princess Koji does not have the slightest dislike for the French or the Americans. She’s a businesswoman. Louis has no issues with her as long as she doesn’t break any French laws within French territory (which she never does). She’s oddly fond of Jake and would rather like to get him into bed. The Reverend Willie Tenboom is an agent of German military intelligence but he’s not Gestapo and he’s a seriously nice guy. Everyone likes him and he likes everyone. Sarah is an American agent but it’s peacetime so her job is just to gather information. All the recurring characters are in fact good guys. They all get along pretty well.

Episode Guide

In the first episode there are spies and double agents everywhere and a plot to build a super-bomb. In the second episode, Shanghaied, Corky is shanghaied by a disreputable sea captain who needs his ship repaired. The captain is involved in an illicit and very nasty trade.

In the third episode, Black Pearl, a flying buddy of Jake’s from the old days in China shows up. He’s a bit disreputable but mostly he’s just an irresponsible dreamer, forever chasing after imaginary treasures or lost cities. Now he’s hooked up with a Watusi tribe who live on a nearby island. It’s crazy. What is a Watusi tribe doing on a Pacific island? Jake’s buddy is sure it has something to do with King Solomon’s Mines.

In the fourth episode, Escape from Death Island, Jake and Corky fly a visitor to a French penal island and find themselves imprisoned.

In Trunk from the Past a trunk is sent to Sarah containing relics collected by her late archaeologist father. He devoted his life to finding the tomb of a certain Egyptian Pharaoh and came up with a crazy theory that the tomb was located on an island in the South Pacific.

In episode six another old flying buddy of Jake’s turns up. And Randall McGraw (Lance LeGault) is always trouble. His cargo plane has gone down and it was carrying something that simply must be retrieved.

In Honor Thy Brother a Japanese fighter pilot wants revenge, Corky gets a wife he doesn’t want and Jack gets his eye back. Next up Jake crash lands on an island within the Japanese Mandate and it’s inhabited by Amish. And a tiger. And a Japanese officer obsessed with cowboy movies. In the next episode something very bad has happened to Sarah on a mission to Manila. It has something to do with General Macarthur.

In the next episode a baseball star visiting the island lands himself in very big trouble involving a local girl. Trouble that could get him lynched. In the following episode Jake, Corky and Sarah crash land on an island inhabited by apes, and they find an ape-boy. In High Stakes Lady Jake is tempted by high stakes poker and a glamorous blonde and of course he falls for her. But the stakes are more than just money.

In Force of Habit Jake discovers that nuns can be pretty dangerous.

In Last Chance Louie it’s Louie who finds that the past cannot be escaped. A new guest arrives on the island and Louis immediately shoots him. It seems that Louis is embarked on a course of self-destruction but he refuses to explain his strange behaviour.

In the next-to-last episode the trouble starts with an eclipse and then a politico-religious cut leader decides that Sarah must be punished for offending the gods. And then things get explosive. Literally.

In the final episode Princess Koji hires Jake as his bodyguard. It’s a very dangerous occupation.

Final Thoughts

There’s plenty of cheesiness but it’s undoubtedly deliberate and it’s combined with a considerable amount of coolness which for me is an intoxicating mix. The cast is uniformly excellent.

For my money Tales of the Gold Monkey is the best action-adventure series of the 80s. There’s just enough humour and romance, the plots are delightfully implausible but fun, the entire cast is excellent and it looks like a very very expensive series (which it was) in which the money was well spent. Very highly recommended.

The DVD release is still in print and extras include a very good “making of” documentary.

The Prisoner TV tie-in novel

In 1969 and 1970 three original novels based upon the television series The Prisoner were published by Ace Books. Since there is some ambiguity about their place in the timeline of the series it’s probably a very sound idea to watch the series before reading the novels. In the case of the first novel you really must be at least vaguely familiar with the TV series. That doesn’t mean you need to rewatch the entire series before reading it, but you need to know what the series is about.

The first of the novels is The Prisoner (later reissued as I Am Not a Number!) which was written by Thomas M. Disch. Disch was a prominent figure in American New Wave science fiction in the 60s. Given that The Prisoner has a very slight science fictional flavour and that New Wave SF tended to be paranoid and edgy Disch was perhaps a fairly appropriate writer for the assignment.

A man and a woman are having dinner in a restaurant. The relationship between them is not entirely clear but there’s some heavy flirting going on. The man has just quit his job. The woman is surprised that he was allowed to do so. He has bought himself a little cottage, a converted gatehouse, in Pembroke in Wales. He has only seen photographs of the cottage but he is sure it will suit him. He has spent the day looking at the furniture he would love to buy for his new home but it’s all hopelessly out of his price range. He will have to be content with cheaper more utilitarian furnishings.

He boards the train for Pembroke. A taxi takes him to a village which is disturbing in its excessive attempts at cuteness and cosiness. He had never been here before but it seems oddly but subtly familiar. He spots his cottage. It looks just as it did in the photos. He attaches no significance to the number 6 on the door. He is puzzled to find that all his furniture is there - the furniture he had fantasised about buying. The furniture that nobody had known that he desired.

He quickly discovers that he is a prisoner. Everybody in the Village is either a prisoner or a jailer but there is no telling which are which. Everybody is referred to by a number. He is Number 6. The person in charge is Number 2.

So it begins exactly as does the TV series, except that it’s not quite the same. There’s that  slight feeling that he’s been here before. If you’re familiar with the TV series you will know what’s going on, except for Number 6’s feeling of déjà vu. There’s something else going on here. And Number 6 has some strange gaps in his memory.

Of course if you know the TV series you know that Number 6 is a British secret agent who has quit the Secret Service. Disch obviously assumes that you do know the TV series and that you do know this but oddly (and I assume deliberately) the words spy or secret agent are never mentioned. Perhaps it’s those gaps in Number 6’s memory. He is obviously aware that he had worked for the government in some capacity connected with security or intelligence but perhaps he no longer remembers exactly what his job had been. Perhaps he no longer possesses the information that Number 2 wants.

When writing a TV tie-in novel it is essential to do nothing to undermine the premise of the TV series. Disch obeys this rule. There is nothing in the novel that is in any way in conflict with the TV series. It’s clearly the same Village. Number 6 is clearly the same Number 6. The themes of the novel are all present in the TV series. This is not a reboot or a re-imagining, but nor is it merely a retelling of the same story.

Disch has added nothing but has put slightly slightly more emphasis on aspects present or implicit in the series. Memory and identity become extremely important. Number 6 is desperately trying to cling to his sense of identity but if one loses parts of one’s memory one’s identity is in a sense threatened. That’s the case not just with Number 6 but with Number 41. She is the woman with whom he was having dinner at the beginning of the novel. Or she might be. Her name is really Liora. Or it might be. It might also be Lorna. How does she come to be in the Village? Is she a prisoner or a jailer? Can Number 6 trust her? Are any of the things she has told him true? And can she trust Number 6?

The paranoia goes deeper. There are things that are genuinely puzzling to Number 2. There are things about Number 6 that are not in line with Number 2’s expectations. And Number 2 also does not know whom he can trust. Even worse, he’s not sure if Number 1 trusts him.

So Disch amps up the paranoia and the sense of an intricate web of lies and deceptions, and the threat to identity. All of which are of course part and parcel of being a spy. And Disch handles these aspects with great skill.

And then Number 6 is persuaded to mount a production of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, after which things get seriously weird.

I’m not sure this novel could really be considered as strictly belonging to The Prisoner canon but it’s an interesting riff on the same theme and a wild crazy science fiction spy thriller. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed The Prisoner (1967-68) TV series.